Breaking Down The Economics Of The New York Times Paywall

The way that it seems the NYT paywall is going to work, visitors
to nytimes.com will have a free allowance of n articles
per month. To read the n+1th article, they will have to
pay a subscription fee F. After that, they can read as
many articles as they like for the rest of the month.

If a visitor to nytimes.com normally reads N articles
per month, then the key number in their mind will be
N-n. If reading that number of articles is worth more to
them than F, they’ll pay the fee. If on the other hand
N-n is small, or perceived value-per-article is small,
then they won’t pay. Specifically, if the average value to the
reader of any given article is v, then they’ll pay the
fee when v(N-n)>F.